House Democrat asks State Department if Biden actually ‘speaks for the administration’ on Taiwan
Joel Gehrke
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President Joe Biden’s pronouncements on foreign policy issues “may or may not” carry authoritative weight, a senior House Democrat concluded after a testy exchange with a State Department official.
“So, the president makes statements [and] the State Department may or may not decide that that’s our policy,” Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) said Thursday during a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing.
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That sardonic conclusion flowed from a pair of frustrated attempts to elicit a clear answer about whether the United States government intends to follow through on Biden’s pledge to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese Communist invasion. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s deputy assistant at the hearing, which focused generally on China’s belligerence in the South China Sea, refused on multiple occasions to affirm Biden’s repeated pledges to defend Taiwan.
“Are you saying that the president’s words are not the words of administration policy?” Sherman asked Dr. Jung Pak, a leading official in the State Department’s multilateral affairs bureau. “Is our policy an unambiguous commitment of American forces to fight against an invasion of Taiwan? Is our policy the policy we had under prior administrations where we were intentionally ambiguous? Or you simply don’t know the policy?”
Sherman’s line of questioning presented Pak with an uncomfortable choice — either to confirm that Biden’s policy towards Taiwan involves ordering U.S. troops into war in the event that China invades or to dodge the question at the risk of undermining Biden.
“From State Department’s perspective, and I’m not going to interpret, I think the president speaks for, I’ll let his words stand,” she said, grasping for a way to sidestep the question.
Sherman was unrelenting. “I know the president speaks for himself. Does he speak for the administration?” he asked.
Biden seemed to create the dilemma for Pak through a series of public appearances in which he asserted that the U.S. would fight on Taiwan’s behalf. “Yes, we have a commitment to do that,” he said during a CNN town hall in 2021. That statement drew a chorus of rebuttals from experts in the history of U.S.-Taiwan relations, given that Congress and past presidents have made a point of stopping short of making such a commitment — at least, they did until Biden began to discuss the issue in media appearances as president.
“So unlike Ukraine, to be clear, sir,” a CBS journalist asked last year, “U.S. forces, U.S. men and women would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion?”
“Yes,” Biden replied.
That public statement makes a marked contrast with traditional American policy. Historically, U.S. officials have maintained a posture of “strategic ambiguity,” in part to avoid the risk of provoking China, which claims sovereignty over the island even though the communist regime has never ruled there.
“I don’t really want to go into hypotheticals,” Pak said as Sherman pressed for a comment on Biden’s pledge to “defend” the island. “We do so in multiple ways, in terms of increasing Taiwan’s international space, Taiwan has a lot to offer — it’s democratic governance, it’s economy.”
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Her evasiveness aggravated the California Democrat.
“Obviously, everybody wants peace. I’m asking the more difficult question, ‘How do we respond if China wages war?’ and you’re not willing to answer or even tell me that you want to be ambiguous,” Sherman said. “What’s been successful is that the Chinese military hasn’t been powerful enough to invade Taiwan. They’re getting close every day. Forty years ago, China couldn’t have invaded Taiwan.”